KLAMATH RENEWAL
THOSE WHO REVERE AND THOSE WHO SCORN FREE-FLOWING RIVERS
Fish Kills and Fish Wars
In September 2002, a dramatically reduced flow of water in the Klamath River along with other factors such as pesticide runoff led to the largest fish kill of salmon ever recorded. Water had been held back at Iron Gate Dam, near the Oregon border. This was due in part to then Vice President Dick Cheney’s manipulation of Interior Department decision-makers to increase the political support of Oregon farmers who wanted to secure the diverted waters.
The consequences were immediate. Dead and dying salmon began to line the banks of the river, as many as 35,000 deaths in those first weeks after Iron Gate Dam limited its release. For members of the Yurok Nation, it was “a mass destruction of our salmon resource” and an “unprecedented biological catastrophe.” And for Amy Bowers Cordalis, who in later years became the Yurok Nation’s chief counsel, the fish kill represented, as she described it in her recently published book, The Water Remembers, “a form of ecocide against my people.”
The fish kill episode on the Klamath took place in the context of fierce struggles over tribal water and fishing rights throughout the Pacific Northwest. Moreover, the fish wars of the 1960s and 1970s were like the struggles throughout the U.S. and Canada over forest and desert lands and other resource conflicts where indigenous groups and Tribal Nations were pitted against energy and lumber companies, local and regional governments, and economic players such as oil and mining companies, as well as the agriculture and commercial fishing groups.
These battles included litigation that had, at first appearance, dramatic consequences. The “fish wars” in the Puget Sound region of the state of Washington, for example, led to a major court ruling, the Boldt Decision (United States v. Washington, 1974), a federal ruling guaranteeing Washington tribes the right to fish in their historic places and gave them the right to co-manage, along with the state government, the life and well-being of the salmon and other fish in the region. In this same period, Amy Bower’s Uncle Ray, who had been arrested nineteen times for fishing on the Klamath, became the plaintiff in another crucial court case, Mattz vs. Arnett. This litigation, also successful, focused on the Yurok Nation’s tribal sovereignty, including the fishing rights on the Klamath River. For Amy Bowers and for the Yurok, it was a family, tribal, and social and ecological justice court victory.
Dam Removal
Despite these victories, court rulings were disregarded and the struggles didn’t end. For the Yurok and their other tribal partners, such as the Hoopa, the key focus was the four dams along the Klamath that had been built between 1918 and 1962 to serve lumber, energy, and agricultural interests. The operation of the dams had major responsibility for the fish kills, the poor water quality and sediment flows, and the undermining of a way of life for the Yurok and their tribal partners.
“Never take more than you need” and “never take more animals, creatures, or plants that we need to survive,” was the advice Amy Bowers heard from her Grandmother Geneva. Geneva would tell the Yurok story about how the Creator, in the form of a holy man, reminded people to live in balance with the natural world by leaving footprints on the beach at the mouth of the Klamath below Rek-woi. Those footprints, continued Geneva in the Yurok narrative, would remain if that balance was maintained. The footprints, however, for Geneva and her granddaughter, had disappeared in the 1970s with the fish kills and the failure to implement her family’s U.S. Supreme Court case.
The heart of the struggle over the next five decades was whether the four dams on the Klamath could be torn down. According to Beth Rose Middleton Manning, a professor of Native American studies at UC Davis, tribes had rarely been consulted throughout the history of U.S. dam construction. As Middleton argued, “in almost every location where there’s a dam, there’s a history of displacement, disruption and putting in that infrastructure without the consent of the communities and nations whose homeland that is.”
The Yurok and their tribal allies, however, persisted. They expanded their dam removal coalition to include fishing groups, environmentalists, researchers and academics, and those public officials who came to appreciate the indigenous knowledge, wisdom, and the tribal sovereignty of the Yurok. The Yurok worked with the farmers, who had been their bitter opponents and with whom they had been engaged in an active war for several decades, to develop a common understanding of how their concept of balance could also include modest and sufficient water flows for farming needs. And they eventually worked out an agreement with PacifiCorp, the owner of the dams then controlled by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway which had acquired the company in 2006. Buffet’s group recognized that maintaining the dams would be a lot more costly than dismantling them, so they signed off too, if they could be protected from liability during the dam removal process.
An Extraordinary Moment
After agreements were signed and then renegotiated, each of the four dams were taken down in sequence, with the Iron Gate Dam the last to be removed on schedule in 2024, with the very last sediment taken out on October 2nd and 3rd. It was an extraordinary moment. Fifty-two years after Iron Gate Dam had triggered the largest fish kill in U.S. history, the removal of the last bits of that same dam and the three others that had preceded it proved to be the largest dam removal process the U.S. and the world has experienced.
The Yurok recognized and celebrated the moment and its historical significance, as did the salmon. A group of teenagers, who had trained for the event for months, descended by kayak from the Iron Gate Dam removal site, past the three other sites where the dams had been removed, to Rek-woi, where hundreds celebrated with them on their month-long journey. The salmon were also making the journey and, undoubtedly, the footprints, virtual or otherwise, began to reappear. Various recordings showed how impressive the teens, from several of the tribes involved, had managed the feat.
Push Back and Challenges
It didn’t take long for the Trump Administration to try to undermine what had been accomplished. Following up on Elon Musk’s slash and burn DOGE process, the U.S. Department of the Interior took back in October, 2025 $2.1 million in federal grants for restoration work that would have funded seven projects along the Klamath River, including for wildfire prevention, habitat restoration, and surveys of Chinook salmon. The work associated with the grants, originally provided through the 2021 Inflation Reduction Act, was already in progress and needed to be halted and invoices for the partial work already completed needed to be paid.
The challenges have only increased. The coalitions pulled together to make the dam removal and river renewal happen remain fragile. Much of the population that lived along the pathway of the dam removal are MAGA supporters, even as many of them came to support the dam removal. Before the victories and the celebrations, seven young Yurok, including Amy Bower’s sister, had committed suicide when the realities seemed bleakest. Climate change in the future could impact river flows. Wildfires at the river’s edge may get larger than the July 2021 Bootleg fire that burned more than 413,000 acres. Those who scorn free-flowing rivers are still in power, though potentially they could on the way out in the next few years. Hope survives.
And the salmon still swim and the tribes still celebrate and revere the fish and the renewal of the river. Balance, as the Yurok say, is local and global. The struggles will continue. And the footprints will seek to reappear.
LINKS
Amy Bowers Cordalis. The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family’s Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life. Little Brown & Co.: New York, 2025
Q&A with Amy Bowers Cordalis. Underscore Native News. November 3, 2025, https://www.underscore.news/culture/q-a-amy-bowers-cordalis-on-her-debut-memoir-the-water-remembers/
Michael Belchik, Dave Hillemeier, and Ronnie M. Pierce, Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program. “The Klamath River Fish Kill of 2002; Analysis of Contributing Factors” February 2004. https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/programs/bay_delta/california_waterfix/exhibits/docs/PCFFA&IGFR/part2/pcffa_155.pdf
Oregon Water Science Center. “The Klamath River: Year 1 Post-Dam Removal,” July 30, 2025. https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/klamath-river-year-1-post-dam-removal#:~:text=With%20the%20dams%20gone%2C%20the%20Klamath%20River,vegetation%20can%20grow.%20Springtime%20flows%20are%20higher.
Klamath Dam Removal and Kayaker event “First Descent” documentary -- https://www.opb.org/article/2025/11/13/first-descent-klamath-documentary/
Jacques Leslie, “Salmon’s Comeback Pits Nature Against Trump Administration.” Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2025. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-11-05/klamath-river-salmon-trump-endangered-species-act
Robert MacFarlane, New York Times. “Trump’s War on Nature Is Up Against a Powerful New Resistance Movement.” May 30, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/river-clean-water-act-klamath.html